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Interactive Brokers has reported that it earns interest on a record $182 billion of its clients' idle cash, according to its Q2 2026 results. This substantial idle cash balance is now in focus as Anthropic, an AI company known for its Claude technology, prepares for a high-profile IPO. The forthcoming public offering, which has attracted significant attention in financial markets, could potentially draw funds away from Interactive Brokers if clients decide to invest in Anthropic's IPO. The company confidentially filed its draft S-1 in June 2026, with expectations for a mid-October launch. The implications of such a move could impact Interactive Brokers' interest earnings if client cash is diverted to this large-scale IPO. Key Takeaways * Interactive Brokers' record idle cash balance of $182 billion appears to be a significant revenue source through interest earnings. * Anthropic's IPO, expected in mid-October, suggests potential shifts in client cash allocation towards the offering. * Market pricing implies a cautious stance on Anthropic's market cap post-IPO, reflecting possible cash flow impacts on Interactive Brokers. What to Watch Observers should monitor the exact timing and pricing of Anthropic's IPO as key indicators. Any delay or lower-than-expected pricing could affect market perceptions and client investment decisions. Additionally, regulatory filings and guidance from underwriters may offer further insight into the IPO's potential impact on Interactive Brokers' idle cash earnings. Analysts will be keenly observing any shifts in cash allocations as the IPO date approaches. Get live prediction-market analysis, powered by Vera. Sign up for Vera.

A Massachusetts proposal would require large AI developers to hire independent evaluators to assess catastrophic risk in their models every four months -- a cadence stricter than anything else at state level in the United States. Anthropic supports it. OpenAI and Google are opposing it, arguing for annual third-party audits instead. The frontier AI labs have spent years making broadly the same argument about regulation: that they take safety seriously, that they welcome sensible oversight, and that rules should be workable. In Massachusetts, that consensus has visibly broken. A state Senate proposal, carried as part of a larger economic development bill, would require large AI developers to commission independent evaluators to assess catastrophic risks in their models every four months. Anthropic is backing it and has described its preferred version as the most robust AI safety legislation in the nation. OpenAI and Google are opposing it. What Is Actually In Dispute The disagreement is narrower than 'safety versus no safety', and it is worth stating precisely. Nobody in this argument is opposing third-party review. The dispute is about cadence and independence. Anthropic wants independent risk assessments every four to six months. OpenAI favours something closer to the approach Illinois took -- annual third-party audits. The gap between four months and twelve months sounds procedural. It is not. Frontier models now ship substantially revised versions several times a year, and an annual audit can assess a model that has already been superseded twice. A four-month cadence is an attempt to make evaluation track the release cycle rather than the calendar. The Case Against, Taken Seriously OpenAI's objection is not obviously self-serving, and it should be engaged with rather than dismissed. Its argument is that aggressive state-by-state regulation produces a patchwork of inconsistent rules, and that the compliance burden of satisfying fifty different regimes delays the release of beneficial models -- including, it notes, tools used for cybersecurity defence. That is a real problem. A company shipping into all fifty states under conflicting evaluation regimes faces genuine cost, and there is no federal framework to preempt it. The patchwork concern is the strongest argument available to the opposing side. The weakness is that it is an argument for federal legislation, and the same companies have not conspicuously pushed for a federal standard strict enough to preempt anything. An objection to state rules that does not come with a proposed alternative functions, in practice, as an objection to rules. Why Anthropic's Position Is Also Not Free It would be naive to read Anthropic's stance as pure principle. The company has built its market identity on safety, and a regulation that makes rigorous evaluation mandatory converts that identity into a competitive moat. Compliance costs that are burdensome for a smaller competitor are absorbable for a company already running the evaluations internally. That does not make the position wrong. A rule can be simultaneously good policy and commercially convenient for whoever proposed it, and the coincidence is a reason to examine the rule rather than the motive. What Makes This Consequential State law has become the actual venue for AI regulation in the United States, in the absence of anything federal. What Massachusetts settles on will be copied, adapted or reacted against by other legislatures, in the way California's privacy law set the template a decade ago. It is also the first time the frontier labs have publicly taken opposing sides on a specific binding rule rather than on principles. That breaks the industry's ability to speak with one voice to legislators, which is a more significant development than the bill itself. What To Watch Whether the four-month cadence survives into the final text or is negotiated toward the annual model. Whether other states move before Massachusetts concludes. And whether any of these companies now supports a federal standard with teeth -- because that is the test of whether the patchwork objection was about the patchwork.

Salesforce reported financial results for the fiscal second quarter that exceeded Wall Street expectations, driving an 18% jump in the company's stock price during Thursday trading. The cloud software vendor posted quarterly revenue growth of 11% compared with the prior year, with the quarter ending on July 31. Net income reached $3.53 billion, or $4.29 per share, representing an 87% increase from the year-earlier period's $1.89 billion, or $1.96 per share. A significant portion of the earnings growth came from investment gains tied to the company's stake in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic. Salesforce reported a $2.6 billion gain from strategic investments, reflecting Anthropic's valuation at $965 billion following an equity funding round completed in May. The company also posted free cash flow of $1.10 billion, up 81% year-over-year and substantially exceeding analyst consensus expectations of $643.2 million. Similar investment gains from Anthropic holdings were noted by Alphabet and Microsoft during recent reporting periods. Looking ahead, Salesforce provided guidance indicating adjusted earnings per share of $3.42 to $3.44 for the fiscal third quarter, with projected revenue of $11.42 billion to $11.50 billion. For the full year, the company raised its revenue forecast to $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion, implying 11% growth at the midpoint and slightly above analyst consensus. The company also announced a new plugin for Anthropic's Claude artificial intelligence model designed to help salespeople compose emails and update records through chat functionality. During the quarter, Salesforce signed a $1.6 billion contract with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and announced plans to acquire customer service startup Fin for $3.6 billion. The company's Agentforce AI products generated annualized revenue of $1.5 billion, representing 240% year-over-year growth. Chief Operating and Financial Officer Robin Washington noted some challenges in selling licenses for integration and analytics software. Salesforce's leadership addressed investor concerns about generative artificial intelligence disrupting the traditional software industry, with co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff stating that dire predictions about AI's threat to software companies have not materialized. Article Attribution | Read More at Article Source Article summary produced by Claude AI

OpenAI and Anthropic have become two of the most influential companies in generative artificial intelligence. Both develop advanced language models and AI assistants, but their philosophies, products and commercial strategies differ. OpenAI has built a broad consumer and developer ecosystem, while Anthropic has positioned itself strongly around reliable, controllable and safety-focused AI. .OpenAI's Approach OpenAI has developed a wide-ranging AI ecosystem spanning conversational assistants, developer tools, multimodal systems and enterprise products. ChatGPT remains its most recognizable product, while its model family powers applications across writing, coding, research and automation. The company's strategy emphasizes broad adoption, increasingly capable models and integration across different forms of computing. .Anthropic's Approach Anthropic developed Claude as its flagship AI assistant and model family. The company places strong emphasis on AI safety, reliability and controllability. Its Constitutional AI approach is designed to guide model behavior using explicit principles. Claude has gained particular attention for writing, analysis, coding and enterprise applications requiring dependable interactions with AI systems. .Models And Capabilities OpenAI and Anthropic compete across increasingly sophisticated capabilities, including reasoning, coding, multimodal understanding and long-context tasks. Their model lineups evolve rapidly, making direct comparisons temporary. Performance can vary significantly depending on the task, model version and evaluation method. Rather than one permanent winner, the competition increasingly revolves around specialized strengths and practical usefulness. .Safety Philosophies Safety is central to both companies, but their approaches have distinct emphases. Anthropic has prominently developed Constitutional AI and research around AI alignment. OpenAI also invests heavily in safety, preparedness and alignment research. Both recognize that increasingly capable systems require safeguards, evaluation and monitoring, although their organizational philosophies and implementation strategies differ. .Business And Ecosystems OpenAI has built substantial reach through ChatGPT, developer APIs and partnerships, giving its technology visibility across consumer and enterprise markets. Anthropic has focused heavily on Claude, APIs and business deployments. Partnerships with major technology companies have strengthened Anthropic's infrastructure and distribution, while OpenAI's ecosystem provides a broad platform for developers and users. .The Bigger AI Race The OpenAI-Anthropic rivalry represents a broader competition over the future of artificial intelligence. The contest is no longer simply about which chatbot answers better. Model efficiency, reasoning, safety, enterprise adoption, developer ecosystems, computing infrastructure and product integration increasingly determine leadership. Their competition is helping accelerate both innovation and scrutiny across the AI industry. .Join our WhatsApp Channel to get the latest news, exclusives and videos on WhatsApp

The artificial intelligence industry is growing rapidly to meet historic adoption rates. To support this growth, data centers are being built as quickly as possible. "The race to scale AI has triggered one of the largest infrastructure build-outs in modern history," concludes a report by McKinsey & Co. Over the next three years alone, the firm projects more than $7 trillion will be deployed globally to scale data center infrastructure. Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue " "Whether a build-out is successful depends on many nuances, including the availability of capital and energy resources," McKinsey Co. warns. The world's current energy system is simply not designed to handle the massive influx of energy-intensive data center infrastructure expected in the coming years and decades. This has led to a surge in new energy projects, even for more speculative technologies like small modular nuclear reactors. The availability of capital, however, is a completely different challenge. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, more than $240 billion in venture funding went toward AI start-ups. That's larger than the entirety of 2025. And that figure doesn't account for public markets, through which hundreds of billions in additional capital have been raised. Now, Anthropic is looking to secure $15 billion in debt financing ahead of a potential IPO. Should the capital raise excite or worry investors? There are two things AI investors should keep in mind. 1. The capital intensity of AI isn't going away Many skeptics have compared the current AI boom to the dot-com bubble. And while there are many similarities, the differences are critical to understand. The biggest difference, perhaps, is that during the dot-com craze, much of the critical infrastructure had yet to be built. That is, most of the world still lacked access to high-speed internet services. There was also a lack of user access points. Today, of course, high-speed internet access is nearly ubiquitous. And billions of people have an internet access point -- commonly called a smartphone -- directly in their pockets nearly all the time. That infrastructure, however, took decades to realize. The AI boom, meanwhile, already has all that critical infrastructure in place, allowing it to grow more rapidly than the dot-com era ever could. But there still is an infrastructure gap. To realize the AI industry's full potential, a massive amount of data center infrastructure will need to be built, triggering one of the biggest infrastructure build-outs in history. Without new compute power, AI growth will stall. Investors should expect capital-intensive projects for decades to come. And with many AI divisions still losing money, sizable capital raises could be the norm through the end of the decade, perhaps longer. Image source: Getty Images 2. Access to capital could become a competitive advantage If capital is necessary to scale the required data center infrastructure, access to capital could become a key competitive advantage. This is likely why so many AI companies are now seeking to go public. SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX), of course, held a record-breaking IPO in June. Now, both OpenAI and Anthropic are looking to go public. Most big tech firms, meanwhile, are already public, allowing them to tap capital markets more easily than their private peers. Scaling compute power will be critical to scaling the capacities of AI technology. In this way, investors should expect heavy competitive advantages for two types of businesses: those that are already profitable, reducing their reliance on capital markets, and those with high valuations and easy access to capital raises, such as firms that are already public. Therefore, large, profitable, public AI companies may have the strongest competitive advantages long term. Should you buy stock in Space Exploration Technologies right now? Before you buy stock in Space Exploration Technologies, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now... and Space Exploration Technologies wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $421,997!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,413,876!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 978% -- a market-crushing outperformance compared to 213% for the S&P 500. Don't miss the latest top 10 list, available with Stock Advisor, and join an investing community built by individual investors for individual investors. See the 10 stocks " *Stock Advisor returns as of September 7, 2026. Ryan Vanzo has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

The artificial intelligence industry is growing rapidly to meet historic adoption rates. To support this growth, data centers are being built as quickly as possible. "The race to scale AI has triggered one of the largest infrastructure build-outs in modern history," concludes a report by McKinsey & Co. Over the next three years alone, the firm projects more than $7 trillion will be deployed globally to scale data center infrastructure. Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again.In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue " "Whether a build-out is successful depends on many nuances, including the availability of capital and energy resources," McKinsey Co. warns. The world's current energy system is simply not designed to handle the massive influx of energy-intensive data center infrastructure expected in the coming years and decades. This has led to a surge in new energy projects, even for more speculative technologies like small modular nuclear reactors. The availability of capital, however, is a completely different challenge. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, more than $240 billion in venture funding went toward AI start-ups. That's larger than the entirety of 2025. And that figure doesn't account for public markets, through which hundreds of billions in additional capital have been raised. Now, Anthropic is looking to secure $15 billion in debt financing ahead of a potential IPO. Should the capital raise excite or worry investors? There are two things AI investors should keep in mind. 1. The capital intensity of AI isn't going away Many skeptics have compared the current AI boom to the dot-com bubble. And while there are many similarities, the differences are critical to understand. The biggest difference, perhaps, is that during the dot-com craze, much of the critical infrastructure had yet to be built. That is, most of the world still lacked access to high-speed internet services. There was also a lack of user access points. Today, of course, high-speed internet access is nearly ubiquitous. And billions of people have an internet access point -- commonly called a smartphone -- directly in their pockets nearly all the time. That infrastructure, however, took decades to realize. The AI boom, meanwhile, already has all that critical infrastructure in place, allowing it to grow more rapidly than the dot-com era ever could. But there still is an infrastructure gap. To realize the AI industry's full potential, a massive amount of data center infrastructure will need to be built, triggering one of the biggest infrastructure build-outs in history. Without new compute power, AI growth will stall. Investors should expect capital-intensive projects for decades to come. And with many AI divisions still losing money, sizable capital raises could be the norm through the end of the decade, perhaps longer. 2. Access to capital could become a competitive advantage If capital is necessary to scale the required data center infrastructure, access to capital could become a key competitive advantage. This is likely why so many AI companies are now seeking to go public. SpaceX(NASDAQ:SPCX), of course, held a record-breaking IPO in June. Now, both OpenAI and Anthropic are looking to go public. Most big tech firms, meanwhile, are already public, allowing them to tap capital markets more easily than their private peers. Scaling compute power will be critical to scaling the capacities of AI technology. In this way, investors should expect heavy competitive advantages for two types of businesses: those that are already profitable, reducing their reliance on capital markets, and those with high valuations and easy access to capital raises, such as firms that are already public. Therefore, large, profitable, public AI companies may have the strongest competitive advantages long term. Should you buy stock in Space Exploration Technologies right now? Before you buy stock in Space Exploration Technologies, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now... and Space Exploration Technologies wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $421,997!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,413,876!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 978% -- a market-crushing outperformance compared to 213% for the S&P 500. Don't miss the latest top 10 list, available with Stock Advisor, and join an investing community built by individual investors for individual investors. See the 10 stocks " *Stock Advisor returns as of September 7, 2026. Ryan Vanzo has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Two months ago, Elon Musk made a bold claim. (I know. Shocking!) Explaining in its initial public offering (IPO) prospectus why Space Exploration Technologies (NASDAQ: SPCX) was justified in asking investors for a valuation more than $1.5 trillion, Musk & Co. asserted that, in the not-too-distant future, its products and services would serve a $28.5 trillion market for space, connectivity, and artificial intelligence (AI) services. And the biggest of these was AI. Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue " According to Musk, AI is a market opportunity of $26.5 trillion. SpaceX argues, Anthropic echoes Such a gargantuan number obviously stuck with me. And when another AI company -- Anthropic -- announced last week that, in its opinion, the total addressable market (TAM) for AI services could reach $30 trillion, well, that rang a big bell. Anthropic reported $11.6 billion in revenue in the second quarter (Q2) of 2026, more than doubling year over year. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company earned a "small operating profit" as well. But Anthropic sees even bigger things ahead for it as its TAM swells to $30 trillion and beyond. So, $26.5 trillion? $30 trillion? These are big numbers, and they're suspiciously close to each other. But that's not the only thing they have in common. Anthropic says it's targeting a TAM comprising "the full scope of work that could be completed with AI models," according to the Journal. And it can reach this TAM if it can "theoretically capture ... 100% market-share." Emphasis on "theoretically." But here's the problem: Estimating the size of a company's TAM requires "a bit of guesswork," says the Journal. Rarely does the company approaching an IPO tell you exactly what it includes in its TAM. Even more rarely does it tell you when it expects to achieve the TAM it cites. Unlike actual market-share reports, says the Journal, TAM estimates are "especially squishy." Which is another way of saying it's impossible to verify them before the IPO has happened -- by which time it may be too late. Examples from history Need examples? In 2019, ride-share company Uber (NYSE: UBER) told investors that its TAM was $6 trillion. But how much revenue did Uber actually pull in last year? $52 billion. Or about nine-tenths of one percent of what it cited as its TAM.

Fermat's last theorem, one of the most celebrated mathematical results of the last half-century, has been turned into computer-verified code for the first time, using an advanced prototype of the artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot Claude. The fact that a machine could turn the work of human mathematicians into a 13-million-line-long, ironclad proof "just completely blew my mind", says Alex Kontorovich, a number theorist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. Claude-maker Anthropic AI, of San Francisco, California, announced the breakthrough on 4 September. The model finished in 11 days a project that was expected to take humans 10 years. The result shows that AI will play an increasingly important part in checking the work of mathematicians -- as well as in producing new mathematical reasoning. At the current pace of progress, it is not unthinkable that AI could soon be able to scrutinize the entire library of mathematical knowledge, perhaps finding that some well-known results are wrong. "Two years ago, that was a fantasy," says Kevin Buzzard, a mathematician at Imperial College London. Mathematicians astounded Mathematicians have been increasingly astounded by the pace at which AI's mathematical skill have soared. This includes the technology's ability to 'formalize' proofs -- translating mathematical arguments from natural language into a formal, computer-certifiable code, typically in the programming language Lean. In February, AI achieved another milestone in AI-aided 'formalization', when it certified the Fields-medal-winning work on the most efficient ways to pack spheres (in a space of 8 or 24 dimensions) of Maryna Viazovska. But Buzzard says that the Fermat's last theorem work was on a whole other level of complexity. "It was maybe an order of magnitude more difficult," he says. Daniel Litt, a number theorist at the University of Toronto, Canada, agrees. "If they can formalize Fermat's last theorem, they can probably formalize anything." The original proof of Fermat's last theorem, completed in 1994 by Andrew Wiles and Richard Taylor, was a landmark result of twentieth-century mathematics. The deceptively simple statement is that there cannot be any whole numbers x, y and z such that x + y = z, if n is greater than 2. French mathematician Pierre de Fermat had made this claim in 1637 but did not leave behind a proof, and it became known as 'his' last theorem -- even though in mathematics, a statement earns the 'theorem' badge only after it has been rigorously proven to be true. (By itself, solving this particular equation -- or knowing that it has no solutions -- does not have much practical use, but the techniques Wiles developed to crack the problem helped to bring distant disciplines of mathematics together. The proof earned Wiles an Abel Prize, one of the most coveted awards in mathematics, in 2016.)

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude artificial intelligence (AI) models, plans to publish its initial public offering (IPO) prospectus after Monday's Labor Day holiday, The Information reported late last month. A listing may follow as soon as late September or in October. Amazon(NASDAQ:AMZN) shareholders have a more specific reason than most to open the document when it lands. On April 20, Anthropic committed to spend "more than $100 billion over the next ten years" with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon's cloud computing segment. That promise is equal to about a fifth of AWS's backlog of contracted work, which reached about $496 billion in June. Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again.In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue " In other words, Amazon has already told investors how much one of its biggest cloud customers intends to spend. What no Amazon filing can show is whether the customer's own finances support it. That's what the prospectus is for. The contract is already in Amazon's filings April's agreement covers up to 5 gigawatts of capacity on Amazon's own silicon -- Graviton processors and Trainium2 through Trainium4 AI chips, with an option on future generations. Amazon's filings show what a deal that size does to the backlog. AWS's backlog (commitments in customer contracts with original terms longer than one year that haven't yet been recognized as revenue) had grown to about $496 billion by June 30. That was up from about $364 billion in March, and from $195 billion in the middle of 2025 -- growth of 154% year over year, including a $132 billion jump in a single quarter. And the Anthropic deal wasn't alone. The filing also discloses a $100 billion, eight-year expansion of AWS's existing $38 billion commitment from OpenAI, announced a quarter earlier. Not only is AWS's contracted future far bigger than it was a year ago, but more of it also sits years away from becoming revenue. The weighted-average remaining life of the segment's long-term contracts stretched from 4.0 years to 6.4 years over those 12 months. One half of the deal is easy to check Of course, a backlog is signed work, not guaranteed revenue. Amazon says the amount and timing of what it recognizes "will be driven by customer usage and our performance in accordance with contractual obligations." Amazon's half of that sentence looks strong. In the second quarter of 2026, AWS's revenue rose 37% year over year, to $42.2 billion -- the segment's fastest growth in 18 quarters and a $169 billion annualized pace. Segment operating income rose about 63% year over year to $16.6 billion. And the AI business inside AWS passed a $25 billion annualized revenue pace of its own, growing triple-digit percentages. The customer's half is the part I can't verify yet. Anthropic is private, and its reported growth is extraordinary. In April, the company said its annualized revenue pace had passed $30 billion, more than triple its level entering the year. And by mid-August, CNBC reported, Anthropic was telling investors the pace had reached $65 billion by the end of July. Spread evenly, the commitment works out to more than $10 billion a year, or about 6% of AWS's current annual revenue pace. That's arguably affordable if Anthropic's growth holds, and heavy if it doesn't. And Amazon isn't just supplying the capacity. Its latest quarterly filing shows the company has put another $10 billion into Anthropic this year, with up to $15 billion more available under a financing arrangement tied to compute-delivery milestones. That means Amazon's interest in Anthropic's financial health goes beyond the contract itself. What does a prospectus settle? Nearly everything the market knows about Anthropic's finances today is reported, not filed. The company's only filing on record is the confidential draft it submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June. Its expected market value is a projection. People familiar with the matter told CNBC last month that the company could go public at a valuation of about $2 trillion, about double its private-market value. Its revenue pace is self-reported, and no audited numbers are public. A prospectus replaces the estimates with audited financial statements: actual revenue, actual profit or losses, and actual cash. Even more useful for Amazon shareholders, it should carry Anthropic's own accounting of its purchase commitments, the other side of the agreements that swelled AWS's backlog. At about $259 as of this writing, Amazon's stock trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of about 24. For a company whose cloud segment just accelerated to 37% growth, I think that's a reasonable price. But AWS has now disclosed more than $200 billion of multi-year commitments from just two private AI companies, and until those companies file, investors can only judge them by reported figures. Ultimately, Anthropic's prospectus is the first chance to check one of them. I'll be reading it closely. Don't miss this second chance at a potentially lucrative opportunity Ever feel like you missed the boat in buying the most successful stocks? Then you'll want to hear this. On rare occasions, our expert team of analysts issues a "Double Down" stock recommendation for companies that they think are about to pop. If you're worried you've already missed your chance to invest, now is the best time to buy before it's too late. And the numbers speak for themselves: * Nvidia:if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2009,you'd have $598,219!* * Apple: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2008, you'd have $61,037!* * Netflix: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2004, you'd have $421,997!* Right now, we're issuing "Double Down" alerts for three incredible companies, available when you joinStock Advisor, and there may not be another chance like this anytime soon. See the 3 stocks " *Stock Advisor returns as of September 6, 2026. Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude artificial intelligence (AI) models, plans to publish its initial public offering (IPO) prospectus after Monday's Labor Day holiday, The Information reported late last month. A listing may follow as soon as late September or in October. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) shareholders have a more specific reason than most to open the document when it lands. On April 20, Anthropic committed to spend "more than $100 billion over the next ten years" with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon's cloud computing segment. That promise is equal to about a fifth of AWS's backlog of contracted work, which reached about $496 billion in June. Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue " In other words, Amazon has already told investors how much one of its biggest cloud customers intends to spend. What no Amazon filing can show is whether the customer's own finances support it. That's what the prospectus is for. Image source: Getty Images. The contract is already in Amazon's filings April's agreement covers up to 5 gigawatts of capacity on Amazon's own silicon -- Graviton processors and Trainium2 through Trainium4 AI chips, with an option on future generations. Amazon's filings show what a deal that size does to the backlog. AWS's backlog (commitments in customer contracts with original terms longer than one year that haven't yet been recognized as revenue) had grown to about $496 billion by June 30. That was up from about $364 billion in March, and from $195 billion in the middle of 2025 -- growth of 154% year over year, including a $132 billion jump in a single quarter. And the Anthropic deal wasn't alone. The filing also discloses a $100 billion, eight-year expansion of AWS's existing $38 billion commitment from OpenAI, announced a quarter earlier. Not only is AWS's contracted future far bigger than it was a year ago, but more of it also sits years away from becoming revenue. The weighted-average remaining life of the segment's long-term contracts stretched from 4.0 years to 6.4 years over those 12 months. One half of the deal is easy to check Of course, a backlog is signed work, not guaranteed revenue. Amazon says the amount and timing of what it recognizes "will be driven by customer usage and our performance in accordance with contractual obligations." Amazon's half of that sentence looks strong. In the second quarter of 2026, AWS's revenue rose 37% year over year, to $42.2 billion -- the segment's fastest growth in 18 quarters and a $169 billion annualized pace. Segment operating income rose about 63% year over year to $16.6 billion. And the AI business inside AWS passed a $25 billion annualized revenue pace of its own, growing triple-digit percentages. The customer's half is the part I can't verify yet. Anthropic is private, and its reported growth is extraordinary. In April, the company said its annualized revenue pace had passed $30 billion, more than triple its level entering the year. And by mid-August, CNBC reported, Anthropic was telling investors the pace had reached $65 billion by the end of July. Spread evenly, the commitment works out to more than $10 billion a year, or about 6% of AWS's current annual revenue pace. That's arguably affordable if Anthropic's growth holds, and heavy if it doesn't. And Amazon isn't just supplying the capacity. Its latest quarterly filing shows the company has put another $10 billion into Anthropic this year, with up to $15 billion more available under a financing arrangement tied to compute-delivery milestones. That means Amazon's interest in Anthropic's financial health goes beyond the contract itself. What does a prospectus settle? Nearly everything the market knows about Anthropic's finances today is reported, not filed. The company's only filing on record is the confidential draft it submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June. Its expected market value is a projection. People familiar with the matter told CNBC last month that the company could go public at a valuation of about $2 trillion, about double its private-market value. Its revenue pace is self-reported, and no audited numbers are public. A prospectus replaces the estimates with audited financial statements: actual revenue, actual profit or losses, and actual cash. Even more useful for Amazon shareholders, it should carry Anthropic's own accounting of its purchase commitments, the other side of the agreements that swelled AWS's backlog. At about $259 as of this writing, Amazon's stock trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of about 24. For a company whose cloud segment just accelerated to 37% growth, I think that's a reasonable price. But AWS has now disclosed more than $200 billion of multi-year commitments from just two private AI companies, and until those companies file, investors can only judge them by reported figures. Ultimately, Anthropic's prospectus is the first chance to check one of them. I'll be reading it closely. Don't miss this second chance at a potentially lucrative opportunity Ever feel like you missed the boat in buying the most successful stocks? Then you'll want to hear this. On rare occasions, our expert team of analysts issues a "Double Down" stock recommendation for companies that they think are about to pop. If you're worried you've already missed your chance to invest, now is the best time to buy before it's too late. And the numbers speak for themselves: * Nvidia: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2009, you'd have $598,219!* * Apple: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2008, you'd have $61,037!* * Netflix: if you invested $1,000 when we doubled down in 2004, you'd have $421,997!* Right now, we're issuing "Double Down" alerts for three incredible companies, available when you join Stock Advisor, and there may not be another chance like this anytime soon. See the 3 stocks " *Stock Advisor returns as of September 6, 2026. Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

The AI company's decade-long cloud computing deal with Amazon dwarfs most tech partnerships in history, and its upcoming S-1 filing will lay bare the financial specifics. Anthropic has pledged more than $100 billion to Amazon Web Services over the next decade, a cloud computing commitment so large it would rank among the biggest enterprise technology contracts ever signed. In return, the Claude AI maker gets access to up to 5 gigawatts of enhanced compute capacity, powered by Amazon's custom Trainium2 through Trainium4 chips alongside Graviton processors. The deal's full financial architecture is expected to become public when Anthropic's IPO prospectus drops, likely shortly after Labor Day. The company confidentially filed a draft S-1 registration statement with the SEC on June 1, setting up a potential market listing by late September or October. A revenue trajectory that rewrites the growth playbook Anthropic's financials have entered a different atmosphere. By the end of July, the company's annualized revenue run rate surpassed $65 billion, up from roughly $9 billion at the start of the year. Amazon has skin in this game far beyond a standard cloud customer relationship. The e-commerce giant made an immediate $5 billion investment in Anthropic on April 20, building on a previous $8 billion stake. That figure could swell by up to an additional $20 billion, contingent on performance milestones that the prospectus will presumably detail. What the AWS backlog tells us Anthropic's commitment feeds directly into AWS's growing order book. As of June 30, AWS reported a backlog of approximately $496 billion, a figure that reflects not just Anthropic's deal but similar large-scale agreements across the AI industry. Anthropic isn't putting all its chips in one cloud basket, though. The company maintains a multi-cloud strategy that includes engagements with Google Cloud, giving it redundancy and leverage in negotiations with any single provider. The IPO calculus The timing of Anthropic's public offering looks deliberate. A post-Labor Day prospectus release would position the company for a late September or October listing, catching the window when institutional investors are back from summer and before the holiday season dampens trading activity. The prospectus will need to address some pointed questions. How much of that $100 billion-plus AWS commitment is fixed versus variable? What are the performance milestones that unlock Amazon's additional $20 billion investment? Amazon's total investment, potentially reaching $33 billion when combining the prior $8 billion stake, the new $5 billion, and the milestone-linked $20 billion, would make it one of the largest corporate backers of a single AI company.

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude artificial intelligence (AI) models, plans to publish its initial public offering (IPO) prospectus after Monday's Labor Day holiday, The Information reported late last month. A listing may follow as soon as late September or in October. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) shareholders have a more specific reason than most to open the document when it lands. On April 20, Anthropic committed to spend "more than $100 billion over the next ten years" with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon's cloud computing segment. That promise is equal to about a fifth of AWS's backlog of contracted work, which reached about $496 billion in June. Missed Nvidia in 2009? This Rare Signal Is Flashing Again. In 2009, a "Double Down" signal flashed for a little-known chipmaker called Nvidia. For the first time in years, that same "Total Conviction" signal is flashing for a company 1/100th the size of Nvidia. Continue " In other words, Amazon has already told investors how much one of its biggest cloud customers intends to spend. What no Amazon filing can show is whether the customer's own finances support it. That's what the prospectus is for. Image source: Getty Images. The contract is already in Amazon's filings April's agreement covers up to 5 gigawatts of capacity on Amazon's own silicon -- Graviton processors and Trainium2 through Trainium4 AI chips, with an option on future generations. Amazon's filings show what a deal that size does to the backlog. AWS's backlog (commitments in customer contracts with original terms longer than one year that haven't yet been recognized as revenue) had grown to about $496 billion by June 30. That was up from about $364 billion in March, and from $195 billion in the middle of 2025 -- growth of 154% year over year, including a $132 billion jump in a single quarter. And the Anthropic deal wasn't alone. The filing also discloses a $100 billion, eight-year expansion of AWS's existing $38 billion commitment from OpenAI, announced a quarter earlier. Not only is AWS's contracted future far bigger than it was a year ago, but more of it also sits years away from becoming revenue. The weighted-average remaining life of the segment's long-term contracts stretched from 4.0 years to 6.4 years over those 12 months. One half of the deal is easy to check Of course, a backlog is signed work, not guaranteed revenue. Amazon says the amount and timing of what it recognizes "will be driven by customer usage and our performance in accordance with contractual obligations."

Anthropic was expected to publish its IPO prospectus this week. Reuters reports it has slipped to late September, with marketing from mid-October and the listing completing days before the US midterms. A $15bn credit facility is the gate. The Anthropic IPO could price at $2trn. Anthropic's stock market debut has moved, and the new date puts it days away from a national election. Reuters reported on Friday that the company expects to start marketing its offering in mid-October at the earliest. The listing would then complete shortly before the US midterms in November. Echo Wang had the story from people familiar with the matter. The prospectus is the piece everyone was waiting for. Bankers had pencilled it in for as early as this coming week. Two of Reuters' sources now put it in late September. Everyone cautioned that the plans, including the timing, could change again. The $15bn facility is the gate The delay is not a market wobble. It is a sequence. Anthropic is trying to finalise a $15bn revolving credit facility. Only after that do analysts meet the company, including analysts at the banks providing the financing. Firms usually leave a few weeks between those meetings and publishing a prospectus. A revolver is a standing line of credit rather than a lump sum. The company draws on it, repays, and draws again. For a business spending at Anthropic's rate it functions as working capital, and having one in place before a listing tells public investors the company will not need to raise again in a hurry. It also sits on top of a large stack of Anthropic-linked borrowing this year. Broadcom went looking for more than $60bn in debt to fund chips for the company in August. Apollo and Blackstone shopped a $36bn chip financing in May. AMD raised $4.75bn in its biggest ever bond sale. A $1.3bn loan is building Anthropic a Texas data centre. None of that borrowing sits on Anthropic's own balance sheet, which is part of why a revolver in its own name matters to the people buying the stock. One of the sources told Reuters that Anthropic expects a tighter window than most, because the analysts already know the business well. Even a compressed version of that sequence pushes the document into late September, and the roadshow into October. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citi are among the banks working on the listing. All declined to comment, as did Anthropic. TNW has independently confirmed none of the timings, which come entirely from Reuters' sources. How $965bn became $2tn in three months The number attached to this company has moved faster than its calendar. Anthropic filed confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, at a valuation then discussed around $965bn. By 10 July its shares were changing hands on secondary markets at $1.2trn on paper. By mid-August the figure in circulation was $2trn, which is where it sits now. That is roughly a doubling in twelve weeks, without a single share trading publicly. Some investors have told Reuters the listing could land at that $2trn mark, making it one of the largest ever attempted. There is a real business underneath it. Anthropic's quarterly revenue passed $11.5bn in August, up more than fourteenfold year on year. What nobody outside the process can do yet is check that against audited figures, because none have been published. We looked at what $2trn implies against revenue last month, and the multiple is not the outlier people assume. It sits below what several listed AI names already fetch. The question the roadshow has to answer is whether public investors agree. The record it would take SpaceX went public in June at $1.77trn, the largest listing on record. A $2trn Anthropic would beat it. Only OpenAI comes close in ambition. It filed confidentially before Anthropic did and still plans to list. Anthropic overtook it on valuation earlier this year, then filed second and may now go first. The banks are familiar too. Anthropic gave Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs the lead roles in June. The Financial Times reported the decision as it happened. JPMorgan and Citi have since joined the syndicate. This is the first time all four have appeared in the same account. Listing into an election The midterm date is the part worth sitting with. Americans vote on 3 November. Completing a $2trn offering days before that means pricing the largest AI company in the world during the closing week of a campaign in which artificial intelligence is itself an issue. AI companies and their backers are spending on the midterms at a scale that was unimaginable two cycles ago, through super PACs aimed at state and federal candidates. Campaign noise reaches a listing in that window in a way it would not reach one in August or January. The timing also gets the deal done before any result shifts the regulatory picture, which cuts the other way. Nobody involved has said the election is a factor. Companies move IPO calendars constantly, for market conditions, regulatory review and ordinary preparation, and Reuters notes as much. The date may be coincidence. What to watch Three markers, in order, and each one is checkable. The $15bn facility has to close. Then analyst meetings, which are private but leak. Then the prospectus itself, which is the first moment anyone outside the process sees audited numbers rather than a figure passed between investors. Until that document lands, every valuation attached to Anthropic, including the $2trn, is a number people have told reporters. Investors have been trading on those numbers for months in private markets, which is how $965bn became $1.2trn became $2trn without anything being sold on an exchange. A prospectus replaces that with something a regulator has seen. Then a roadshow replaces the prospectus with what buyers will actually pay. Neither has happened yet, and both now sit inside the last three weeks of an election campaign.

That step, which would begin the final stages of the offering, is now not expected until late September SAN FRANCISCO, California: Anthropic is now expected to begin marketing its initial public offering in mid-October at the earliest, with the listing potentially completed just days before the U.S. midterm elections in November, people familiar with the matter said September 5. The artificial intelligence company had previously been expected to make its IPO prospectus public as early as next week, two of the people said. That step, which would begin the final stages of the offering, is now not expected until late September. The people cautioned that the plans, including the timing, could still change. The shift delays what some investors have said could be a US$2 trillion listing, potentially making it one of the largest IPOs ever attempted and a major test of investor demand for the fast-growing artificial intelligence sector. Companies often adjust IPO schedules as they work through market conditions, regulatory reviews and other preparations. As part of the IPO process, Anthropic is seeking to finalize a $15 billion revolving credit facility, after which analysts, including those at banks involved in the financing, are expected to meet with the company, one person said. Bloomberg News previously reported that Anthropic was in talks to expand the facility to $15 billion. Companies typically leave several weeks between analyst meetings and the public release of an IPO prospectus. Anthropic, however, is expected to have a tighter timetable because analysts are already familiar with the company, the person said. Anthropic declined to comment. The offering is expected to be one of the most closely watched IPOs, as investors seek public-market exposure to the expanding artificial intelligence industry. It could come alongside potential listings by other AI companies, including OpenAI. Elon Musk's SpaceX went public in June at a record $1.77 trillion valuation. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citi are among the banks working with Anthropic on the IPO, according to people familiar with the matter. The banks declined to comment.

Mōrena and welcome to today's wrap of the business and political headlines you need to know this morning. Artificial intelligence giant Anthropic has an October initial public offering in its sights, with reports that the Claude developer could file its papers in the coming weeks and complete a listing before the US mid-term elections in November. Stronger than expected jobs growth in the US stoked bets that the Federal Reserve will hike its benchmark interest rate later this month, with the robust labour market providing scope for a move higher ahead of key inflation data this week. Oil prices remained elevated heading into the weekend, with US and Iran trading strikes and US energy secretary Chris Wright saying tankers will need naval escorts through the Strait of Hormuz for some time yet. With Wall Street closed on Monday on the Labor Day public holiday, markets are expected to be subdued in Australia and New Zealand with ASX futures pointing to a flat start to the week. Anthropic is expected to start marketing its IPO targeting a valuation of as much as US$2 trillion in mid-October, with the Financial Times reporting the AI giant was close to tapping Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to lead the offering. Paperwork could be filed as early as this week, with Reuters reporting that a listing could be completed before the US midterm elections on Nov 3. Meanwhile, rival OpenAI said its agents took over wiki sites and used them as message boards, with the ChatGPT maker saying more transparency was needed about those types of incidents. Separately, the Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Friday in the US, claiming the tech companies copied the news organisations' copy to train their AI models without permission. And Taiwan contract electronics maker Foxconn said AI-related demand continued to drive sales and was expected to deliver a better-than-expected third quarter result. Chipmakers were among Wall Street's gainers on Friday, with Nvidia and Intel both on the green side of the ledger in a broadly softer day to the US stock market. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures on Friday showed the world's biggest economy added 162,000 jobs last month, more than twice the 55,000 forecast by economists. The strong reading fuelled expectations that the Fed will have room to raise the federal funds rate later this month if this week's inflation reading comes in hot, with the CME FedWatch tool showing markets pricing in a 59% chance of a hike. "A better-than-expected US jobs report contributed to higher front-end Treasury yields while equities made modest losses as markets priced a higher chance the Federal Reserve will raise rates this month," Bank of New Zealand senior interest rate strategist Stuart Ritson said in a note. "The rebound looks more like payback after two weak months and the reversal of seasonal distortions than a sustained acceleration, with the three-month average still modest at 71,000." The yield on US 10-year treasuries rose 3 basis points to 4.79%, matching its New Zealand equivalent, while the kiwi dollar traded at 58.81 US cents at 7am in Auckland from 58.96 cents last week. Meanwhile, Norway's US$2.4 trillion sovereign wealth fund proposed cutting its holding of government bonds to 50% of its benchmark bond index from 70% to diversify its sources of returns. Stocks on Wall Street were broadly weaker, with Apple, Microsoft and Salesforce leading a 0.5% decline for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, while the S&P 500 dipped 0.4% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite decreased 0.3%. US markets are closed on Monday for Labor Day. Brent crude oil futures rose 0.3% to US$95.83 a barrel heading into the long weekend, with more retaliatory strikes between the US and Iran on Saturday as the conflict remains elevated. Meanwhile, Wright told CNN's State of the Union programme that ships going through the Strait of Hormuz would need a naval escort for some time, with the region delivering about two-thirds of pre-conflict flow. European stock markets were mixed on Friday, with the UK's FTSE 100 fractionally weaker, while Germany's DAX up 0.2% and France's CAC 40 dipping 0.1%. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the war with Russia would likely drag on through the winter after talks with US negotiators seeking to broker a peace deal with Russia. Australian futures are pointing to a 0.1% decline for the S&P/ASX 200 index when trading opens across the Tasman, with investors watching for any sign that the latest Middle East escalation would lift oil prices.

That step, which would begin the final stages of the offering, is now not expected until late September SAN FRANCISCO, California: Anthropic is now expected to begin marketing its initial public offering in mid-October at the earliest, with the listing potentially completed just days before the U.S. midterm elections in November, people familiar with the matter said September 5. The artificial intelligence company had previously been expected to make its IPO prospectus public as early as next week, two of the people said. That step, which would begin the final stages of the offering, is now not expected until late September. The people cautioned that the plans, including the timing, could still change. The shift delays what some investors have said could be a US$2 trillion listing, potentially making it one of the largest IPOs ever attempted and a major test of investor demand for the fast-growing artificial intelligence sector. Companies often adjust IPO schedules as they work through market conditions, regulatory reviews and other preparations. As part of the IPO process, Anthropic is seeking to finalize a $15 billion revolving credit facility, after which analysts, including those at banks involved in the financing, are expected to meet with the company, one person said. Bloomberg News previously reported that Anthropic was in talks to expand the facility to $15 billion. Companies typically leave several weeks between analyst meetings and the public release of an IPO prospectus. Anthropic, however, is expected to have a tighter timetable because analysts are already familiar with the company, the person said. Anthropic declined to comment. The offering is expected to be one of the most closely watched IPOs, as investors seek public-market exposure to the expanding artificial intelligence industry. It could come alongside potential listings by other AI companies, including OpenAI. Elon Musk's SpaceX went public in June at a record $1.77 trillion valuation. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citi are among the banks working with Anthropic on the IPO, according to people familiar with the matter. The banks declined to comment.

The artificial intelligence company had been expected to release its IPO prospectus as soon as this week, Reuters reported Friday (Sept. 4), citing sources familiar with the matter. That move, a critical step that would set off the closing stages of the listing, is now not expected until late September, the sources said. Anthropic is expected to start marketing the IPO in mid-October at the earliest, completing the listing days ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, the sources told Reuters. PYMNTS has contacted Anthropic for comment but has not yet gotten a reply. The company declined to comment when reached by Reuters. As Reuters noted, companies often alter their IPO calendars as they deal with market conditions and regulatory oversight, so this change is not unusual. The report added that this shift delays what some investors have claimed could be one of the largest IPOs ever attempted at $2 trillion, and a key test of the market's appetite for AI. Anthropic hopes to finalize a $15 billion revolving credit facility as part of its IPO process. According to one of Reuters' sources, the company from there will meet with analysts, including those from banks taking part in the financing. While companies usually wait a few weeks to make their IPO prospectus public after analysts meetings, this source said Anthropic is expected to have a shorter window as analysts are already well familiar with the startup. The company's IPO could come alongside other potential AI listings, including that of OpenAI. SpaceX, which listed earlier this year at a $1.77 trillion valuation. In other AI news, last week saw a report that while adoption of the technology is spreading, the money is accumulating among just a handful of companies. New Ramp data shows that the top 1% of customers make up 80% of the enterprise revenue for both Anthropic and OpenAI. That's a concentration that has remained in place even as more companies begin paying for generative AI, Ramp lead economist Ara Kharazian said on X. "This is a level of concentration risk unseen in any other software category we track," Kharazian wrote on LinkedIn. "At Anthropic, that concentration has a name attached to it," PYMNTS wrote. "Coding tools Cursor and GitHub Copilot alone drove roughly $1.2 billion of the company's $5 billion revenue milestone last year, close to a quarter of total revenue from just two customers." For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude artificial intelligence (AI) models, plans to publish its initial public offering (IPO) prospectus after Monday's Labor Day holiday, The Information reported late last month. A listing may follow as soon as late September or in October. Amazon (AMZN -0.15%) shareholders have a more specific reason than most to open the document when it lands. On April 20, Anthropic committed to spend "more than $100 billion over the next ten years" with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon's cloud computing segment. That promise is equal to about a fifth of AWS's backlog of contracted work, which reached about $496 billion in June. In other words, Amazon has already told investors how much one of its biggest cloud customers intends to spend. What no Amazon filing can show is whether the customer's own finances support it. That's what the prospectus is for. The contract is already in Amazon's filings April's agreement covers up to 5 gigawatts of capacity on Amazon's own silicon -- Graviton processors and Trainium2 through Trainium4 AI chips, with an option on future generations. Amazon's filings show what a deal that size does to the backlog. AWS's backlog (commitments in customer contracts with original terms longer than one year that haven't yet been recognized as revenue) had grown to about $496 billion by June 30. That was up from about $364 billion in March, and from $195 billion in the middle of 2025 -- growth of 154% year over year, including a $132 billion jump in a single quarter. And the Anthropic deal wasn't alone. The filing also discloses a $100 billion, eight-year expansion of AWS's existing $38 billion commitment from OpenAI, announced a quarter earlier. Not only is AWS's contracted future far bigger than it was a year ago, but more of it also sits years away from becoming revenue. The weighted-average remaining life of the segment's long-term contracts stretched from 4.0 years to 6.4 years over those 12 months. One half of the deal is easy to check Of course, a backlog is signed work, not guaranteed revenue. Amazon says the amount and timing of what it recognizes "will be driven by customer usage and our performance in accordance with contractual obligations." Amazon's half of that sentence looks strong. In the second quarter of 2026, AWS's revenue rose 37% year over year, to $42.2 billion -- the segment's fastest growth in 18 quarters and a $169 billion annualized pace. Segment operating income rose about 63% year over year to $16.6 billion. And the AI business inside AWS passed a $25 billion annualized revenue pace of its own, growing triple-digit percentages. The customer's half is the part I can't verify yet. Anthropic is private, and its reported growth is extraordinary. In April, the company said its annualized revenue pace had passed $30 billion, more than triple its level entering the year. And by mid-August, CNBC reported, Anthropic was telling investors the pace had reached $65 billion by the end of July. Spread evenly, the commitment works out to more than $10 billion a year, or about 6% of AWS's current annual revenue pace. That's arguably affordable if Anthropic's growth holds, and heavy if it doesn't. And Amazon isn't just supplying the capacity. Its latest quarterly filing shows the company has put another $10 billion into Anthropic this year, with up to $15 billion more available under a financing arrangement tied to compute-delivery milestones. That means Amazon's interest in Anthropic's financial health goes beyond the contract itself. What does a prospectus settle? Nearly everything the market knows about Anthropic's finances today is reported, not filed. The company's only filing on record is the confidential draft it submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June. Its expected market value is a projection. People familiar with the matter told CNBC last month that the company could go public at a valuation of about $2 trillion, about double its private-market value. Its revenue pace is self-reported, and no audited numbers are public. A prospectus replaces the estimates with audited financial statements: actual revenue, actual profit or losses, and actual cash. Even more useful for Amazon shareholders, it should carry Anthropic's own accounting of its purchase commitments, the other side of the agreements that swelled AWS's backlog. At about $259 as of this writing, Amazon's stock trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of about 24. For a company whose cloud segment just accelerated to 37% growth, I think that's a reasonable price. But AWS has now disclosed more than $200 billion of multi-year commitments from just two private AI companies, and until those companies file, investors can only judge them by reported figures. Ultimately, Anthropic's prospectus is the first chance to check one of them. I'll be reading it closely.

Some authors hoping to receive their share of Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement said they received surprising emails this week -- emails informing them that someone else was making a claim on their payments. Anthropic settled a copyright class action suit last year, after a judge ruled that training AI models on copyrighted material is legal under fair use doctrine, but pirating that material was not. The deal received final approval in July, allowing the payments to move forward. Under the terms of the settlement, the authors of nearly 500,000 titles will be paid $3,000 for each pirated work. If the book is still in-print with a traditional publisher, the money will be split 50-50 between author and publisher. If the book was self-published, or if the publisher reverted the rights by allowing the book to go out-of-print, then the author should get the entire payment. But writers have been posting on social media that publishers seem to be claiming more than their fair share of some payments. For example, mystery and thriller author April Henry asked, "WTF is HarperCollins playing at? They claimed one of my books on the Anthropic Settlement that reverted back at least 17 years ago AND on the same day I got a credit alert saying they had been added as my employer! (which they never were)." At the popular blog Writers Beware, Victoria Strauss wrote that she's been receiving author complaints that fall into two broad categories: one where publishers are seeking payment for works that they no longer have a legitimate claim on (because the rights have reverted), and another where publishers are seeking a full 100% payment when they're only entitled to 50%. In both cases, Strauss said she's "reluctant to attribute to malice what can be plausibly explained by poor recordkeeping" -- and she noted that some publishers have already said this is a mistake that they've asked Anthropic to fix. Similarly, Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger told The New York Times that she doesn't see this as "a grab by the publishers" and that she doesn't believe publishers are "specifically trying to screw any author over." Instead, she argued that this is the predictable result of bad record-keeping and a confusing settlement process. Strauss also acknowledged that any complaints she's seen are just "a peek through a small crack in a massive wall." "But the unusually large number of reports I've received over the last two days, as well as the fact that authors are reporting the exact same errors over and over, suggest to me that these aren't the kind of routine glitches you might expect from such a large operation, but something much more wide[s]pread and systemic," she wrote. And publishers aren't the only ones seeking a cut of the payments. Strauss said she's gotten complaints that a number of literary agencies are also making claims, which she said is surprising since "agents are not rightsholders in the books that they sell." Author Courtney Milan (the pen name of former law clerk and law professor Heidi Bond) was more blunt in a post on Bluesky, writing, "Apparently some agents are trying to claim percentages on the Anthropic settlement, and I do not REMOTELY think they should do this, what the fuck, stop that shit!" Milan and the Authors Guild also shared more details about how authors can dispute their payment allocations. (One tricky issue: When the rights to a specific book reverted. In order for an author to make a 100% claim on a book, the rights reversion needs to have happened before August 10, 2022, which is the "download date" in the settlement.)

The AI company's revenue grew more than sevenfold in roughly seven months, and prospective backers want to know exactly how that number is being counted. Anthropic is sprinting toward what could become the largest AI IPO in history, and the investors lining up to participate have one persistent request: show us the receipts. The Claude maker's annualized revenue run rate ballooned from roughly $9B at the end of 2025 to over $65B by the end of July 2026. The numbers behind the frenzy Anthropic's preliminary Q2 2026 revenue clocked in at $11.5B, up from $4.73B in Q1 2026. For context, Q2 2025 revenue was $787M. So the company roughly 15x'd its quarterly top line in a single year. That growth has also pushed the company into unfamiliar territory: profitability. Anthropic posted its first quarterly operating profit of approximately $559M in Q2 2026. The company's most recent private round, a record $65B Series H completed in late May 2026, valued Anthropic at $965B post-money. Some prospective IPO investors are now projecting a public market valuation north of $2 trillion. Internal revenue projections for 2028 sit in the $190B to $200B range, according to figures being shared with potential backers. The accounting question investors keep asking Revenue growth this steep invites a specific kind of scrutiny, and prospective IPO investors are zeroing in on one issue in particular: how Anthropic accounts for revenue generated through cloud reseller partnerships. The distinction matters more than it might sound. When Anthropic sells its models through a partner like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud, the question is whether the company books the full amount customers pay (gross revenue) or only its share after the cloud provider takes a cut (net revenue). Enterprise customers already account for roughly 80% of Anthropic's revenue. Over 1,000 businesses were spending at least $1M annually on Anthropic's products as of April 2026. Many of those customers access Claude through AWS Bedrock or Google Cloud's Vertex AI, which means the gross-versus-net question touches a significant portion of total revenue. The path to public markets Anthropic confidentially submitted its draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC in June 2026. The company is working with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan as underwriters. The public filing of the S-1 is anticipated in late September 2026, with a roadshow potentially kicking off in mid-October. The company has raised between $118B and $130B in private capital across its funding history. Amazon holds approximately 21% of the company, while Alphabet owns around 15%. For Amazon in particular, the math is striking. A 21% stake in a company valued at $2 trillion would be worth roughly $420B. What this means for the AI sector Anthropic's IPO will function as a pricing signal for the entire AI industry. If the company achieves a $2 trillion valuation, it effectively sets a new ceiling for what public markets are willing to pay for frontier AI capabilities. There's a risk dimension worth watching, too. Revenue that grows from $787M to $11.5B in a year is extraordinary, but it also means the company has very little historical baseline for predicting churn, seasonality, or customer concentration risk. Investors projecting $190B to $200B in 2028 revenue are essentially betting that a trend line drawn from fewer than four quarters of meaningful data will extend smoothly for another six quarters. The first operational profit is encouraging, but $559M on $11.5B in quarterly revenue implies thin margins relative to pure software businesses. Capital expenditure on compute infrastructure, talent costs for top-tier AI researchers, and ongoing model training expenses all weigh on the bottom line.
